


king shao

by hydrochaeris



Series: spiderweb [1]
Category: The Get Down (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Drug Use, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia (barely referenced though), Multi, dizzee kipling is a good brother, shaolin fantastic is doing his best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-05
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-28 13:10:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10102277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hydrochaeris/pseuds/hydrochaeris
Summary: “Shao, you ever heard of loving more than one person at a time?”





	

**Author's Note:**

> some context: dizzee and thor are in a relationship and out. mylene and zeke are also in a relationship.

Shao knew it was weird, inviting Dizzee over alone. He could see the weirdness of it written all over Dizzee’s face, too—the clear question with the answer Shao didn’t really want to provide. After all, if he was going to be alone with any of the Brothers, Zeke was his go-to.

Which was exactly the fucking problem.

Half a joint later and Shao was still restless and silent. It felt like the drugs hadn’t mellowed out his mind at all. His knee kept jumping up in sporadic bursts of motion. He could see Dizzee out of the corner of his eye, not watching him, not openly curious, completely chill, shoulders loose and relaxed. Shao envied that shit, he’d admit that much. To not be constantly on the lookout, to be able to take interludes from reality, that was a gift. A dangerous gift—it was being alert and on edge that kept him safe—but he craved peace of mind anyway. Or to be in a place where he was allowed to have peace of mind. Wishing for both felt too damn selfish.

Shao felt his own mouth open and words try to push through. It wasn’t a thick, drug-induced haze stopping him like he’d experienced before. It was a thing he hated with every inch of himself. A thing he’d worked hard to repress, and now here it was, switching their roles, repressing him. The fear coiled up lazily from his stomach and set its vipers head sinuous and slithering up in his throat. Its jaws were poised half-open in mirror of his own. He could almost taste metallic poison dripping from its fangs. Then he realized he’d been biting his own lip.

Dizzee shifted on the couch perpendicular to the chair Shao was bent up in. He had worked steadily through his own joint; it was barely a nub of anything now.

“So you wanted me up here to smoke,” Dizzee said, words effortless, casual. “That all you wanted me for?”

Shao could feel all his ideas knocking around his head at once. Like every beat of a different record he had to switch between when DJ’ing, except they all went to back to one familiar pulse. The same rhythm he’d felt pounding through his veins when he’d first met Zeke and he swiped that stupid record. And later, when they’d been up on the roof, on top of their world, and Zeke had turned to him and said, “You a natural everything.” And Shao hadn’t been able to repress the smile or the feeling that had surged up suddenly in him with those words.

“Thor doing okay?” he asked. Dizzee’s face betrayed no shock except a flicker of thought he could see ripple through his forehead—a wave moving in one direction, then gone.

“Yeah,” Dizzee said. He looked down at the hand not holding his joint, curled it a little. His nail polish was orange and it glimmered like the flame of the lighter they’d used to spark up. “He’s good. Real good. Like, that plane of existence the aliens live on, where it’s all open and free, it used to be a little empty, too, you know? And sometimes he goes up there with me now. And we don’t even gotta go up there anymore to just be us.”

“Right.” Well, this was Dizzee he was talking to, Shao wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting. He’d tuned out half the words anyway—always had to with Dizzee—in favor of focusing on his face. Shao wondered if Dizzee knew what he looked like when he talked about Thor. The guy was always a thousand miles away, so his expressions could be a little hard to gauge. But Dizzee looked a kind of free Shao’d never known someone could feel. He didn’t know if Dizzee had become more vacant and extraterrestrial or if he’d gotten more grounded with the small smile that appeared whenever he spoke about Thor. Shao thought maybe it was both.

“The freedom of the alien is the most important aspect,” Dizzee was saying when Shao zoned back in. “And the simultaneous knowledge that he is an other, and always himself to himself, but always abnormal to everyone not himself. So he is free within his own spirit only. Everyone else has an energy that flows in the opposite direction of his. And his energy is not negative or wrong. But it stands out, and that makes him unsafe. Not unsafe as long as he remains in his mind, but as soon as he exits that realm, as soon as he tries to interact with the energies of everyone else in society, he is in danger. When you find someone else who flows with the energy you were born into, you gotta go with them. That’s how electronics vibe with each other.”

“I like Zeke,” Shao said, and immediately regretted it. “Shit,” he said much more quietly. More whisper than word.

“Like,” said Dizzee, and paused. “You like Zeke how I like Thor.”

Oh,  _ now _ Dizzee knows how to get to the point, does he?

Shao could feel his entire face heat up. He put his hands over his cheeks, pointlessly, leaned his elbows onto his knees. “Forget it.”

“’M not forgetting it if that’s what you invited me here for, man.”

“Don’t—” Shao interrupted himself. “I’m an idiot. Fuck this. You gotta leave.”

“No,” Dizzee said, easy as that. He reached across the couch and put his skinny fingers around Shao’s nearest wrist, tugged till it came away from his body and his head’s weight had tipped into his other hand. “It’s okay, man, for real. This what you wanna talk about? Then talk.”

Moments like these he remembered that Dizzee was the oldest Kipling.

“Nah, it’s like.” He groaned, took his wrist back from Dizzee, and put his arms between his knees, hunching over even further. “I don’t know. I l—I like him a lot. It keeps hitting me. It won’t leave me the fuck alone.”

Dizzee snorted. “Yeah, well, when you reject an emotion instead of letting yourself immerse yourself in what’s occurring within you, the emotion can start showing up even more. Have you tried not ignoring it?”

Shao looked at him incredulously. “Fuck no! I’m Shaolin Fantastic, I can have any girl I want, I’m not gonna—go—like, shit,” he finished clumsily. “I’m not gonna let him distract me from doing what I gotta do.”

“’Course not,” Dizzee said, raising his eyebrows. “He doesn’t hafta be a distraction. You don’t need to put off liking him because it’s gonna take time away from doing what you do. Both can be done. Unless, of course, you’re ignoring your feelings for him because you don’t wanna have them, which is a whole other—”

“I don’t have  _ feelings for him _ ,” Shao spat. “That’s what Mylene’s got for him. And what he’s got for her and shit. I just like him. More than I should.”

“I think you know exactly how you feel about Zeke.” Dizzee’s voice hardened, then softened abruptly. “You jealous of Mylene?”

“Mylene can do what she wants.”

Dizzee leaned back into the couch and propped his feet up on the low table.

“Shao, you ever heard of loving more than one person at a time?”

“Like Mormons and shit?”

Dizzee put his hands behind his head and exhaled. “Sure. But not really, I don’t know how white people do that shit all disrespectful. Like do you think Zeke could be with Mylene like he is now, and with you at the same time?”

“Mylene already hates me, man. Why the fuck would I steal her man?”

“Nah, you’re not stealing no one. You’d negotiate with both of them before anything happened.” Dizzee rolled his eyes, not in a mocking way, more like he was trying to see the back of his skull to search through all his thoughts. Knowing Dizzee, he really was. “Jesus, I can actually truly see this working. You’d have to get on way better with Mylene, but shit, man. Zeke—” He cut himself off, gaze turning to Shao, who looked up at him from between his arms and knees. “He could love both of y’all. I can see it.”

“Don’t do that shit,” Shao said sharply, pushing himself to sit upright. “Don’t make like you know things you don’t. I swear I’ll kill you if you lie to me like that again.”

“Okay, sure,” Dizzee said, sinking even further back into the couch, not looking at Shao anymore. “I won’t say it again. I just want you to think about it.”

Shao let his eyes shut—he didn’t mean to—he didn’t want to let his guard down—he saw Zeke, turning from Mylene’s arms to put a hand on Shao’s shoulder, draw him in, and—

He flinched out of his brain.

“Fuck.”

“We must let go of our fears to conquer them,” Dizzee said absently, and Shao thought of the snake in his throat, twisting its tail to a knot in his stomach. “We must free our fears to free ourselves.”

Shao imagined the snake sliding out of him, the red of its eyes blinking against the terrifying white scales of its body, its tongue flitting back and forth between its fangs. The remaining space in his body was hollow and shivering without the snake living there. The remaining space in his body could be a vessel for how he felt his lips want to tug up at the very mention of Zeke’s name— _ Ezekiel Figuero _ , full of rich syllables so very fitting for a wordsmith. For how he wanted those moments where Zeke leaned into his arm, where Zeke bumped his fist against Shao’s own, where Zeke turned the stars he called eyes away from the world and only on Shao, to replay on a continuous record, one track, spinning forever. And he felt his cold bones start to warm slowly. Like a radiator that’d been out of use for awhile that had to sputter and cough before it could start doing its job properly.

“Mylene and me’re both pretty possessive,” he said quietly. “But you think it could—”

Dizzee’s long arm wrapped around his shoulders with no hesitation. He pulled Shao out of the chair and onto the couch beside him, tucking Shao into the side of his ribs and bringing his other arm around to complete the hug.

“Shit,” Shao whispered. “Listen, this never happened, okay? You tell anyone else and—”

“You’ll kill me, I know,” Dizzee said. Shao thought he could stand to sound a little less bored about it, that it was probably insulting—but the way Dizzee kept rubbing at his back and the way that motion kept making Shao let out more tears than he’d thought his body could hold, he couldn’t think about that too much.

“Don’t touch me,” Shao said, trying for anger, and Dizzee looked down at him just for a moment before pulling him in tighter.

“Yeah, I won’t.”

“I don’t cry.”

“You don’t cry.”

“Shaolin Fantastic does not fucking cry.”

“Shaolin Fantastic’s a bad motherfucker,” Dizzee said, “and—”

“If you say some shit like ‘bad motherfuckers cry too,’ man, I will break every finger you got.”

“I got ten,” said Dizzee amicably.

The tears stopped coming as he’d known they would all along, because he knew that crying didn’t last forever even if it felt like the terrible feeling rising up in him, the ache in his heart forcing the tears out of his eyes, never would. He stopped crying and found that his bones were still warm, inside, and his skin was too, outside, because Dizzee was still holding him.

“Thanks,” Shao said. He didn’t know how to fucking astral project to whatever planet Dizzee went to all the time to be himself or whatever. He only had himself here, on this planet, with his kingdom, where the king cried and was comforted by an alien.

“Yeah, any time.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> this is my first ever fic for the get down!! and i wrote it between midnight and 1 am, so if there's anything weird or incoherent or ooc i'm blaming both of those things. i'm thinking of writing a sequel or two and i'd love comments about what worked/didn't work for you in this fic. thanks for reading! you can reblog this on tumblr [here](http://yeahbees.tumblr.com/post/158046768230/king-shao).


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